Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

An anonymous reader writes "It appears that the Source Engine Postal III game is coming to Linux as was originally planned and is slated for release in May, according to the Running With Scissors CEO. 'Yes we are still planning a Linux release. We, that is RWS, are waiting for a final beta from our production team in Moscow. Like you and yours, we are anxious and frustrated. ... It looks like May if all goes well. We are hopeful to reach a distribution deal at GDC and [worst] case we go [direct download] and will find another team [for] Linux.'"

Quite frankly I'd say that the Postal series is actually bad for gaming they are normally quite poor, and create a lot of controversy which the developers nor publishers address.Which is just plain bad for the medium.

Postal is the only game series where your quest is to buy some milk, and then you go out and kill everything that moves. Does that kind of remind you of your typical MMO quest, except it's a lot more honest about the "yeah, we only make up a thin excuse of a story so you don't feel like it's mindless killing" part?

They also made fun of terrorists back when everyone else was afraid of them.

It's certainly not a masterpiece, but there's a bit more in it than what you make out, and it rightfully has its fans.

Uwe Boll has surprised me a lot and made movies that are very good actually. Rampage is a must see if you havent seen it already. With Uwe Boll as both writer and director you probably expect a turkey but its really good. Same with darfur, had to check two times who directed it.

I loved the movie even more but sadly it was denied any form of distribution because it wasnt PC.

Then why not just distribute a politically incorrect movie on the PC, such as to the kinds of people who rent from Netflix Watch Instantly or buy from iTunes? Plenty of erotic film studios have chosen that route.

Postal was the first Uwe Boll movie that seemed consciously funny. It was actually pretty funny.

And Postal 2 was hilarious. I don't care if the game was technically great or not, it was funny as hell. I got way more entertainment out of that and Apocalypse Weekend than I ever got out of any award-winning game. Fuck Master Chief, I'll take The Postal Dude any day.

On the contrary, I for one quite enjoyed Postal 2. Yes it's just an excuse for committing mindless violence, but so what? So is just about every other FPS, MMO, etc when you get right down to it. There's something refreshingly honest about it.

Besides, just because you can shock people with a taser, set them on fire then piss on them to put them out doesn't mean you have to. You decide how violent you want to be.

On the contrary, I for one quite enjoyed Postal 2. Yes it's just an excuse for committing mindless violence, but so what? So is just about every other FPS, MMO, etc when you get right down to it. There's something refreshingly honest about it.

I had no issue with the violence in Postal 2. I like games where enemies are reduced to giblets as much as the next person. But I had plenty of issue with the horrific loading times, the badly designed levels and the mindless repetitiveness of it. I still recall the nausea I felt after playing, wandering around maze after maze of boxy levels. I just thought it was a bad game.

Give me funny, innovative and good games like Magicka with price 10-20 euros for Linux and it as gameplatform would rise like a phoenix (Magicka).Even if now posting a Source engine to Linux and Valve would give all its own games for Linux, Windows would suffer a lot, while Mac and Linux would start gaining even more popularity in homes.

In videogames, you play against your own competence or against other players. The one which shows the most mastery at the game win. The goal of the game is competition.

That is an extremely simplified view. While many people compete in sports for the very same reason, others use sports to feel better, excercise, be with friends - and competition enters very late, if at all. In my final school years, I was in a local Volleyball team. We went to competitions every now and then, and usually lost horribly. It didn't matter to us, because the fun, and being with the same group of people you liked regularily, was what counted most.

Nuff said. I swear, someone needs to filter out these moronix stories. It feels like they get their stories from a nine year old telling rumors to the geek table at the lunch room. "Hey man, it's official, microsoft is porting halo to linux!!! ZOMG!!! I heard from a bobby who told johnny who told jamal! It must be true!"

What compelling evidence? That there were a couple of ifdefs with Linux in them and an official statement from Valve was that they WEREN'T working on it? Yeah that's mighty compelling. One also has to remember that Michael first made this Steam for Linux claim back in 2008 which was a completely overblown thing and turned out wrong. Then he claimed last year in May that it was coming by the end of the summer. Then when that failed he kept claiming that it "was coming soon" and here we are 6 months late

Why would I want Steam on Linux? Hell will freeze over before I'll install that.

To play commercial games on Linux? Steam already works through WINE but the game support is pretty ropey - some games work others won't even start.

I'm surprised that Codeweavers or Transgaming hasn't approached Valve to produce a a free but supported version of Steam for Linux with games running under emulation. They'd get a % cut of the sales for supporting the product. Transgaming's Cider is the tech that most OS X game ports use anyway.

It's a form of package manager for a certain OS that lacks a good native package manager, combined with heavy DRM.

Which OS does have a native package manager combined with heavy DRM, other than the Mac App Store that Mac OS X just recently added? Popular package managers used on GNU/Linux, such as apt or yum, don't have any form of DRM, not even password authentication before downloading; they assume that any non-free package is still free to redistribute. Without DRM, any publisher big enough for retail will stick to the consoles. It's happened to Epic, and it's happened to Capcom (Street Fighter IV isn't getting upda

Steam isn't a virtual machine. To have games on Linux they need to be ported to it, and for that Steam is entirely unnecessary.

I never said Steam was a virtual machine. I said it works through WINE and when you launch a game that also works through WINE. i.e. you can install WINE, install Steam for Windows and run both Steam & downloaded games on Linux. The Steam client works pretty well, unfortunately games are hit and miss - some games work, some don't.

And no, games don't have to be ported to Linux and its unlikely that many ever would be. Not even OS X gets as many ports as people think - most of them are recompiled Win32

Wine is very unreliable and not officially supported. I might give it a try for a free game, but I'm not paying one cent for that end-user experience.

And no, games don't have to be ported to Linux and its unlikely that many ever would be. Not even OS X gets as many ports as people think - most of them are recompiled Win32 apps linked against Cider which is Transgaming's equivalent to winelib for OS X.

That's different in that it constitutes official support, even if done in a half-assed way. If it breaks you

Steam DRM is usually never noticeable unless you're one of those weirdos without an internet connection. But feel free to be an ass to prove a point that nobody but you will care about though, we shall nod in your honor.

I'm one of those weirdos with a laptop that's not perpetually hooked to an internet connection, because sometimes it's used in the underground, on a plane, or in a foreign country where I have a hard time getting access everywhere.

Thanks for letting me know that you outsourced the game to foreigners. So you can pay them nothing compared to an American programmer.

Then perhaps the problem is with foreign farmers, who are paid nothing compared to an American farmer. Cheaper food means cheaper land, and both mean a foreign programmer can earn less and still live in reasonable comfort. Are you comparing wages using exchange rate with U.S. dollars, as I suspect, or are you comparing them using purchasing power parity [wikipedia.org] measures such as the exchange rate with Big Mac sandwiches [wikipedia.org]? If the former, all you're telling me is that some foreign currencies are temporarily undervalued

Your clothes are made in china, as are most of your electronics (or Taiwan, South Korea, etc) your food comes from all over the place (that which IS US based is heavily subsidized). The oil you burn comes from the middle east, and all your phone support lines route through India. But please, don't let them take VIDEO GAMES!

I'll support you in boycotting foreign made games the moment you refuse to wear foreign made clothes, buy foreign made electronics and drive a foreign car powered by foreign gas. Now that

Epic released information for several years on the development of a Linux client for Unreal, which in many gamers eyes meant that any engine games would be easy to port to linux, and open up real tier-one gaming on the OS. This was all a long stream of FUD, however.http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=ODI1OA [phoronix.com]

Wine is not an emulator. Wine is an executable loader and an implementation of the Win32 toolkit. Saying a Wine application on a GNOME- or KDE Plasma-based distribution is "not native" is like saying a Qt application running on a GNOME-based distribution is "not native", or a Gtk+ application running on a KDE Plasma-based distribution is "not native".

Last time I checked GTK and QT apps do use native ELF executable formats. Win32 PE is a foreign executable app, the Linux kernel can't load these directly like they can with ELF. Its really not the same thing at all.

Wine has improved quite a bit over the years. However, there is still a performance gap when running foreign Win executables through Wine. Performance issues aside, there are still areas where Wine has not yet fully implemented the Win32 API.

Wine is an executable loader and an implementation of the Win32 toolkit.

Last time I checked GTK and QT apps do use native ELF executable formats.

What practical effect does the choice of ELF or PE executable format have on an application's performance? In the MS-DOS era, were protected-mode applications compiled with DJGPP (such as Quake) considered not native because they used COFF [delorie.com] instead of the built-in, real-mode-only MZ executable format?

there are still areas where Wine has not yet fully implemented the Win32 API.

"Wine is incomplete" is a valid criticism, but it's far from "Wine is not native".

The post to which you replied never said anything about emulation.

"Emulated" is the opposite of "native" in some senses.

Until the day I can check a box in my kernel config to natively load Win32 PE binaries, its a foreign executable format.

Graphics are not handled in the kernel; they're handled by X, a user-space

You tried to argue that Wine being foreign to the Operating System is like arguing that Qt and GTK are not native to Linux. If Win32 PEs were native to Linux, you wouldn't need Wine to run "Windows native executables".

Graphics are handled in the kernel and user space. File system drivers are handled by the kernel and user space. CUPS and SANE are system daemons and have nothing to do with the kernel, and your point is? You know what all your straw man arguments have in common, all those bloody things ar

You tried to argue that Wine being foreign to the Operating System is like arguing that Qt and GTK are not native to Linux.

When the X Window System was first introduced, it was uncommon and therefore foreign to UNIX. When Microsoft Windows was first introduced, it was uncommon and therefore foreign to MS-DOS. It was thought that the command line was "native", and GUIs were for Macs. Heck, Windows apps even used a different executable format from MS-DOS.

If Win32 PEs were native to Linux, you wouldn't need Wine to run "Windows native executables".

I stated earlier that "Wine is an executable loader and an implementation of the Win32 toolkit". If Linux, kFreeBSD, and other kernels on which Wine runs could load PEs, this wou

Yes! Just think of those commies, touching your hard-earned dollars with their mucky fingers, defiling the portraits of American leaders. Yuck!

Make sure you also don't hit a foreign web site while browsing - those commies are sneaky, and will insert ads in their sites, so as to lay hands on your cash in a roundabout way. Say no to terrorism - filter out all IPs outside of good old USA!

I read the story title and thought it said "Portal III, Source Engine Still Coming to Linux". I was so full of happiness and joy! A triple hit! Another Portal game, Source and Linux IN THE SAME STORY. Perhaps, once Portal was on Linux valve would port Counterstrike Source and I could forever abandon Windows! I saw a vision of a broken window, and through it poured fresh, pine scented air and butterflies and hypo-allergenic puppies. It was the happiest moment of my life.

This fits perfectly with my plans to dump Sony. That is, no new console from Sony, ever. I am tired of being frustrated and humiliated by Sony, and I am out hundreds of dollars of repair bills for their defective products.

Mind you, my replacement for Sony will not be Microsoft (way too evil) or Nintendo (way too cutesy). It will be a Linux game box, and as far as I am concerned, any game that does not run on Linux from then on does not exist. It's not like I have time to play all the games I have now anyway